He looked like she’d slapped him, but she kept talking in that same thoughtless, will-­less way. She tried to explain that she cared for him but didn’t love him, that she didn’t belong here, no matter how it might seem that she did. He’d be better off with someone else, someone who was . . . she searched for the word . . . dedicated. But it sounded like gibberish, and she stopped talking. She was shocked at the pain in his face. Their affair had been a kind of bargain to her and she’d thought it was the same to him. But now she saw that it wasn’t. He’d really wanted her, not just someone to make the house livable, to wear the nice clothes he’d buy, to have children. He was a better man than she’d thought, and she started to miss him already. She thought of Hegel’s view of humanity. Adam had thought it was shallow, silly.

“Everyone’s not part of everyone,” Adam had said. “We’re bound in our own skins, we’re not syntheses of what’s happened to us, of people and ideas around us. We’re ourselves,” he’d told the class gravely, “it is possible to cut ourselves off. . . .”

The tribe had cut itself off; she was doing it, too, and she wasn’t ready for that either. Allan walked blindly out of the glass porch. She started to follow him, but he said, “Leave me alone, Rachel, just leave me alone.”

She went back into the living room, took the ring off, and left it on the table next to the couch. She went to the door and looked back at it. She’d worn that ring for a long time, and on top of the sadness, fear, and everything else that she was feeling, she knew she’d miss the way clerks in the supermarket and women who came into the shop looked at it. It glittered in the dim light, threw points of perfect color on the ceiling. She nodded to it as if it were a person, then she left the house.